Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  The unmarked unit crawled through the sweltering city with Spence at the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat, still numb. The traffic was loud and tangled, and my head was pounding with images of Earl Jackson’s small mutilated body. All I wanted to do on this earth was to get Wilbur Durand.

  “God, Spence, he was right there. All I had to do was pull out my handcuffs. . . .”

  “I know the feeling. But not yet. This is one you don’t want to screw up with a mistake.”

  It would also have meant that I had to touch him. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, no way.

  The photos of the studio were in my lap. Heat shimmered up off the pavement as we crawled along. Once again, I worked my way through the images of Durand’s bizarre world, craving the spark, just that one small spark of insight. Instead, I was confronted with heads, arms, teeth, wigs, ears, blood and guts—all of it incomprehensible to a regular person.

  “Look at this,” I said. I held a photo out. Spence glanced quickly at it as he drove.

  His forehead wrinkled. “What the heck is it?”

  “A whole container of fake boogers—that stringy rubber stuff that you’d put into an actor’s nose so it hangs down and looks like snot.”

  “I hope that’s not why we’re going back there.”

  Who could say what would get him in the end? “It’s got to be something ordinary. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

  We entered through the same reception area and were challenged by the same underling. Once again, we ignored him.

  “He’ll get used to us,” I joked. But as soon as we were back inside, all levity ended. I fell into a sort of focused trance, letting my eyes go from box to box, from shelf to shelf, resting for a few moments on everything. I put my brain into scan mode and did the mental equivalent of channel-surfing, hoping that something, anything, would tweak my attention.

  I thought about my own kids; what would they have that could be kept in this room without causing too much notice? The place was full of film memorabilia-in-waiting, things that might someday be as famous as Dorothy’s ruby—

  Slippers.

  Footwear props. The box had been emptied on the floor and the contents were strewn all over the place. A detective from one of the other divisions was counting shoes methodically. It was like I was staring at my own living room—sneakers everywhere. Kids wear sneakers. There were way too many pairs of adolescent footwear compared to other kinds of shoes in that box.

  Why did he have so many sneakers?

  There was a glaringly empty sneaker box in Nathan Leeds’s room.

  The lawyer came back in. He stood in the doorway with the assistant, who had probably summoned him the moment I reappeared.

  “Shoot. Let’s put the shoes back in the box,” I said quietly to the counting cops. “We’re going to take it with us.”

  They must have thought I was nuts. One of them gave me a look.

  “Don’t do anything that will ruffle the little twerp over there.”

  When we carried the box out—Spence on one side, me on the other—the lawyer went berserk. “What are you doing? Where do you think you’re going with that? Your warrant doesn’t say anything about my client’s personal property—” He was hovering around me, shouting threats and covering me with angry spittle, even though he was still clutching the warrant in one hand.

  “Shut up!” I commanded, and to my eternal amazement, he did. As we stood near the door holding the box, I calmly repeated my initial statement to him. “We have a warrant to remove materials as evidence in the investigation of several crimes.”

  He started shouting again. But his shouting didn’t stop us.

  Two burly patrolmen carried the box up from the garage and dropped it on the floor just past the division reception desk. I dragged it by myself into one of the interview rooms despite myriad offers of assistance—now that I had it, I didn’t want anyone else touching it until I could examine every single shoe myself.

  Nike, New Balance, Adidas, Puma—every brand imaginable. All hiding in plain sight. I started calling parents to make appointments for the viewings, half an hour apart, all evening long and then again in the morning.

  I wondered when my ex would start asking me to pay him child support, instead of the other way around. He might have been right to accuse me of being a bad mother. That’s how it was beginning to feel to me. But at least my kids were safe.

  The parents and guardians arrived as requested. Some were eager and arrived early; they had to wait. Nervous impatience permeated the air as family members of missing children abided ticks of the clock in uncomfortable bright-orange plastic chairs, knowing there was the chance that a beloved child’s death might be confirmed at long last by evidence.

  Two large tables dominated the center of the interview room, each one covered with rows of neatly paired sneakers. Escobar had rushed home and gathered up several sets of his own kids’ old sneakers, marked by hidden stickers on the underside of each shoe’s tongue. I set coworkers to digging through the depths of their lockers for forgotten pairs. It was like putting photos of cops in street clothes into a picture lineup with an actual suspect; the validity of the hoped-for positive identification was bolstered by having known negatives in the mix and having them passed over by the identifier in favor of the real thing. We deliberately tried to steer this witness off track, Your Honor, just to be certain that he was positive about the identification, but he went right back to the defendant’s picture no matter how many others we introduced to him.

  Fred Vuska, Spence, Escobar, and I watched through the two-way mirrored glass as a uniformed officer brought these apprehensive adults into the room and led them through the strange exhibit. I’d instructed the parents and relatives specifically not to touch the items to prevent contamination, but it was a sure bet that someone would try. It didn’t take long; one of the fathers put his hand out, then pulled it back again, then looked toward the mirror—he was smart enough to know we were watching—and just nodded. His shoulders slumped and he started to cry.

  I went directly into the room and retrieved the pair of size sevens from among its peers. I held them out in my gloved hands and asked the father, “Are you certain that these shoes belong to your son?”

  He managed to whisper “Yes” through his tears. He pointed to a faint paint mark on one toe. “We were painting the front porch last Father’s Day and Jamie dripped paint onto his sneaker. I got most of it off, but there was some on the end I couldn’t get.”

  I took a closer look at it, and saw that in the grooves of one toe there were bits of green visible against the gray-white of the rubber.

  If there was any doubt about the identification of the sneaker as belonging to that child, we could make a paint comparison—sneaker to porch—to confirm it.

  By that time, the evidence technician I’d sent out had returned from Ellen Leeds’s apartment with the sneaker box nicely bagged and labeled. I had him put it in the evidence locker. I looked back through the glass just in time to see another man—an uncle of a victim—turn away, buckle at the knees, and vomit. I rushed in to help him. After wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he pointed to a pair of Disney World laces he’d bought for his nephew on a business trip to Florida. The ends had been cut off because they were too long and the boy was tripping on them all the time. He identified them positively by the dab of Duco cement he’d put on the cut edges to keep them from fraying.

  And so it went, with several more positives. When all the evening’s parents were gone, we were left alone to acknowledge our sad victory.

  The weight of our new discovery seemed to land on all of us at once. Finally Fred turned to me and said, “I guess you got your man. You know that all hell is gonna break loose once this gets out.”

  He was right; it would be mayhem. Suddenly I was more tired than I’d felt in my entire life. And now that I had Wilbur Durand in my trap, I was struck with the odd realization that I wasn’t quite ready to haul him in. My life
had to be cleared out before I gave it over to him.

  “I need a day to take care of a couple of things before we go out with it,” I said.

  Fred stared in disbelief. “What things?”

  “Things, Fred. Details. I have to write all this up and get it into the files, and I need to get some sleep before doing any of that. All I need is one day.”

  “Is there any risk to any more kids if we wait?”

  Now he asks.

  “I can’t say one way or the other, you know that. I know he needs to prepare for what he’s doing if he keeps doing it the same way, and we’ve been in his face, so he’s probably not ready for another one.”

  “I hate probably.”

  We all did. “One day,” I said quietly.

  It was a Tuesday evening when all this took place. Fred gave me until Thursday morning to clean up the details of the case and organize everything so that a proper arrest could be made.

  We actually shook on it. Maybe he was shaking my hand in congratulations, I don’t know, but it felt like we were sealing a gentlemen’s agreement. I had a little bit of time, assuming this didn’t get out in some way. I’d already told all the parents that we were preparing an arrest warrant but couldn’t say who the suspect was yet—we wanted to make it right, so we needed their cooperation in keeping things quiet. It was hard to do; they all pressed me pretty vigorously for information. I didn’t give anything away, and it killed me.

  It was close to midnight before I was through with everything. When no one was looking, I slipped into one of the interview rooms, pulled the blinds over the two-way glass so no one could look in, and flopped down into a chair, where I crashed and burned with a vengeance. These would probably be my last moments of privacy and solitude for a while; there were mountains to climb still. Arrest warrant, the actual arrest, arraignment, indictment, trial, sentencing if we won . . .

  Please, God, don’t let there be a trial, don’t let there be a chance for anyone to screw this up. . . . Make him plead to something so we won’t all have to get dragged through all that legal muck. . . .

  But did I really want that? Sure it was easier, but for that ease there was always a trade-off. If the state accepted a plea, the state would have to trade life in prison for the possibility of death.

  Did I really want that? There was no sense dwelling on it for the moment. My whole life was about to change—more for the worse than the better. If we won this thing, there would be some accolades and maybe a promotion, but for the foreseeable future it was going to be sheer hell. My kids’ lives would change too. There would be no quiet evenings of homework or TV. No trips to the Santa Monica Pier. They would be spending a lot more time with their father, not that that was so terrible. They would be hounded by classmates and friends.

  I stood up finally and went to get Nathan’s shoe box. I found the pair that had to be his from the mix, and laid the shoes gently into the box; like Cinderella’s glass slipper, they slipped into place easily. I’d left them until last because it would have tainted something to know ahead of time if his sneakers were in there. Everything after that would have seemed like just a confirmation, and I didn’t want to deceive the parents who were putting themselves through renewed pain to look through all those shoes. It just didn’t seem fair.

  The application for the arrest warrant was my career masterpiece, as clear and succinct as any piece of police writing I’d ever produced. I wanted the prosecutor to be so engaged in this thing that he would go to the mat for it if the need should arise.

  Fred was busy handpicking the group who would bring in our bizarre suspect. When he briefed the incredulous brass, I was required to be there to explain when necessary. Fred was extremely careful to phrase his statements so they wouldn’t think we’d missed this one. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach, not to mention angry.

  And they say police work isn’t creative.

  I was enjoying a brief moment of amusement, thinking of Fred in his schlumpy suit in the middle of all those fancy uniforms, when the phone rang on my desk.

  Pandora heard trouble in that electronic trill, but she picked up the phone anyway, fool that she is.

  A twelve-year-old boy had been approached by what he thought was a family friend as he was walking home from after-school soccer practice. The supposed friend pulled up alongside him in a car and announced that his mother had asked him to pick the boy up because she needed him home sooner. The incident occurred on a side street where traffic was relatively light, with two witnesses. One was a bad-attitude, drugged-out little teenage tramp who was just about as unhelpful as she could be.

  The other, miraculously, was the boy himself, who got away.

  His name was Carl Thorsen, and unlike the junkie-in-waiting, who had to wipe her nose after every other slurred word, he spoke so fast that I had to ask him to repeat just about everything he said.

  “The car pulled up alongside me real close to the sidewalk I slowed down because I thought it was Jake’s car the passenger door came open so I stopped walking and looked inside but there were shadows and I couldn’t really see whoever was inside very clear but I thought it was Jake at first because it was the right kind of car and it sorta looked like him so I figured what the heck of course it’s him but there was something about the voice that bothered me it didn’t sound right because it was too high so I got real scared and stepped back but before I could get completely out of his reach he grabbed my sleeve and started to pull on me so I really struggled a lot and I got loose again and then I ran as fast as I could away from there.”

  Carl swore that he screamed, but there was no one around except the girl, who said she didn’t hear a scream and also claimed she couldn’t have read the plate number on the car from that distance. I regretted not hauling her in to division for a little governmental inconvenience. Maybe it’s just as well that she wasn’t cooperative; junkies make lousy witnesses.

  I put Carl in a patrol car and sent him off to division, where they’d call his parents and get the wheels of justice rolling. Escobar and I got the evidence crew started on the abduction site and then canvassed the neighborhood while they did their work. One of the people who lived on the street told us that she thought she might have heard a boy scream, but she didn’t look outside to see what was going on. No one else heard or saw a thing.

  God, I would love to have had the plate number from that car.

  When I got back to the station I asked Carl to give me his shirt. There wasn’t much of a chance that we’d find fingerprints, but I was praying that we’d get lucky—good fortune seemed to be out and about that day, especially in the world of Carl Thorsen. The shirt looked awfully clean and unwrinkled for having been involved in a “struggle”—no rips, abrasions, or stretched areas that I could see.

  The mother arrived; I let her spend a few minutes alone with her son before I went in to see the two of them together.

  “I’ll need your friend Jake’s phone number and address.”

  She seemed more than eager to cooperate on behalf of her friend. “I have his cell phone number,” she said. “Call him right now. He didn’t do this, I know he didn’t.”

  I knew that too, but I couldn’t say it just yet.

  Jake had been alone in his car at the time the incident occurred and therefore had no witnesses as to his whereabouts, except one who turned out to be rather fortuitous: the state trooper who gave him a speeding ticket four minutes after the precise time of the abduction attempt, in a location more than twenty miles as the crow flies from where that attempt was made.

  You’re getting sloppy, Wilbur.

  I advised the horrified Jake to come directly to the station; he arrived in less than fifteen minutes, in a complete state of hysteria. We established his alibi right away, and I let him know that he was not a suspect. Then I jumped right into asking him what I really wanted to know.

  “Have you and Carl gone anywhere that you might have been seen together publicly within the last two
years?”

  You should have seen the look on his face. “Of course we have. All sorts of places. He’s like my own kid.”

  I’ll admit it’s not the first question you’d expect under the circumstances. But I didn’t want it said later that I had directed him in any way to the La Brea exhibit. I wanted him just to mention it on his own without prompting. So I asked him to be more specific about the events they’d attended. He got pretty flustered, then recited a list of movies, ball games, meetings, and entertainment events—

  And an exhibit.

  I couldn’t help myself. I grinned like a Cheshire cat. I didn’t even try to hide it. I actually almost shouted I was so happy.

  What did he think of the tapes that people were making as they waited to get in?

  They were cool, a really great idea; he and Carl had clowned around and hammed it up for the camera. He said it was almost as much fun as the exhibit itself.

  “What on earth does any of this have to do with Carl being abducted?”

  I let the question hang in the air unanswered. “If you wouldn’t mind, Detective Escobar is just going to ask you a few more things, and then we’ll take you to see Carl and his mother.”

  Escobar wrote down what Jake revealed about the nature of his relationship with the boy and why he spent so much time with him, as well as a few more details about his schedule that afternoon so the alibi would be unassailable. Never in the history of crime have cops gone so far to bolster someone’s alibi—usually we’re bending over backward to tear it apart. It was overkill—all we really had to do was photocopy the speeding citation and get an ID from the highway patrolman.

  Even Johnnie Cochran couldn’t make that glove too small.

  The whole squad room burst into activity after this incident. One guy, I kept saying to everyone. It’s one guy. No one disagreed. It was a thrill to watch all these supervisors tripping over themselves to make it look like they’d been supporting my theory all along. Time flew by as we worked it all over; when I looked up at the clock, it was almost five. I had to call Kevin pretty quickly and ask him to get our two younger kids from swim practice at five-thirty. There was no way I was going to make it. For the first time since I’d started working on these disappearances, I wasn’t worried—even Wilbur couldn’t put another grab together that quickly.